Remote Working Part 2 – Tips on self management
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
The key reason men and women fail to adjust to operating remotely is they fail to realise the neccesity of high-quality organisation and rigid self discipline.
I have been working remotely for nearly 8 yrs since I first discovered Quickbooks online an ‘on demand’ small business accounting software service and was spellbound by the fact that if you can perform accounting online then why shouldn’t it be workable to perform other key types of of work away from the conventional office?
Whilst working remotely has substantial gains there are numerous things that workers don’t realise which evolve into problems that cause lower productivity and lower motivation. The most significant reason for decreases in work output from remote employees is interruption and it is a established and well known fact that it can take a person up to twenty minutes to return to their original output level after experiencing a disturbance.
Deeper insights reveal that persons who are consistently subjected to disruptions are more likely to be susceptible to lower memory power and are prone to developing mental health trouble in old age. We live in an over communicated environment and it is essential that you are acquainted with the problems this causes before you start working remotely. When operating remotely you have to do everything feasible to mitigate the risk of being disturbed.
Here are my most important tips:
1, Get a habit, make sure that everybody knows it and rigidly adhere to it!
Good examples are a consistent time of day when you review or send mail and make or take telephone calls. Before I began working remotely I used to receive in the region of two hundred electronic mails every 24 hours. Now I think I am unfortunate if I get in excess of 5. To ‘restart’ my electronic mail experience I modified my e-mail address and vigorously took steps to guard the details being made available to anyone. I then made sure every individual who I gave my e-mail address to, to use it prudently. I also configured an automatic response that swiftly told anyone sending me mail my schedule for reading mail and if something required my immediate attention to mark it as ‘Urgent’.
2. Get rid of alerts.
Turn off every feature that can send you a interruption. This includes mobile and
ordinary telephones and forms of alerts from e-mail such as visual alerts, beeps, display changes to your inbox folder and of course facing a window. Get a door on your work place and put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign on it.
In ‘Remote Working Part 3 – The ‘kit’ list’ I will reveal my favourite tools and software.
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